CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Twelve Hundred Miles Away

How much did Zog know about what was going on in occupied Albania? Next to nothing reached the foreign media. He claimed to receive information via agents in Istanbul, but this cannot have been very reliable. Communication was almost as difficult in the other direction: because of the Greeks and Zavalani, the BBC Albanian service did not let him broadcast. Zog languished as a redundant commentator on events only barely perceived.

The Italo-Greek War had brought hardship to Albania, yet sympathies were divided: once Greece and Yugoslavia joined the Allies, some Albanians leaned towards the Axis, especially when the Germans created Greater Albania. All the same, by late 1941, small resistance bands were operating in the mountains, and that autumn saw the emergence of a new force in Albanian politics. Tito, the Yugoslav communist boss, sent a couple of comrades to make something of Albania's eight heterodox Marxist factions. The result was an Albanian Communist Party, with 130 founder-members, led by Enver Hoxha. Most were urban Tosks, but they began to form peasants and deserters into Partisan units. Emulating Tito, Hoxha brought together various resistance groups in 1942 to create the National Liberation Movement - LNC in its Albanian acronym. This was ostensibly a broad united front, but his cadres quickly took control. LNC partisans wore red star badges, gave clenched fist salutes, and adulated Stalin.

In response, some anti-communist bands, concentrated in the Vlora region, started a loose rival grouping called the National Front (or Balli Kombetar). The Ballist programme was nationalist, making much of Greater Albania. (The communists, by contrast, had to sideline the Kosovo issue, as it strained their relations with Tito.) The principal Ballists, mostly Tosk beys, had been enemies of Zog in 1924. Their resolve to prevent an LNC regime at the end of the war did not imply any wish to restore the King. Where then were the Zogists? Not yet greatly in evidence as such. Monarchism was most likely to be found among the Muslim Gheg clans, and they were not fully integrated into the LNC or BK.

By 1943, the assorted guerrilla units amounted to some six thousand men, and the Italians were plainly losing the wider war. When the Allies invaded Sicily in July, Mussolini soon fell from power. 'The natural result of the imperialist policy pursued by the Fascist regime', declared Zog.1 His ardent hope was that the Allies would next land troops in Albania. Churchill was actually toying with the idea, though the USA opposed any operations that might divert resources from the invasion of France in 1944.

By the time the Italians surrendered in September 1943, the rival Albanian guerrilla groups had come down from the mountains and taken over the towns. Civil war might have broken out at once - if the Germans had not swept into Albania and driven them back into the highlands. One occupying army thus replaced another, and it therefore meant little to most Albanians when Italy completed its change of side. Zog, however, was appalled that the Allies accepted Italy as a co-belligerent without even requiring King Victor Emmanuel to drop his secondary Albanian title.

At Teheran in November, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin ruled out any Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans. The only outside intervention would be further small SOE missions aimed at encouraging local resistance and raising false expectations of a major landing to distract the Germans in the run-up to D-Day. Between spring 1943 and autumn 1944, SOE sent over fifty British Liaison Officers (BLOs) into Albania. They soon realised that the divisive politics of the Albanian resistance replicated Partisans versus Chetniks in Yugoslavia and EAM/ELAS versus EDES in Greece. Their remit was to arrange supply-drops for all groups regularly active against the occupiers, yet many BLOs found their hosts infuriating. The guerrilla leaders presumed that an Allied victory was just a matter of time, so their chief concern was to prepare to seize power as soon as the Nazis withdrew. Each group demanded lots of arms for itself and none at all for its rivals.

The communists viewed the British with particular suspicion, and most BLOs found little to admire in Enver Hoxha, 'a tall, flabby creature in his early thirties, with a sulky, podgy face'.2 The Ballist beys, if more courteous, were even less impressive, for they frankly wanted to avoid combat and save themselves for an uprising in the final stages of the German defeat. The BK also demanded that the Allies preserve Greater Albania. Differences over Kosovo wrecked a short-lived unity pact between Partisans and Ballists, and the Germans concentrated on fighting a major offensive against the former. Simultaneously, the German army channelled weapons to the Balli Kombetar and promoted a civil war. Ballists began to resemble collaborators.

There was now a third guerrilla organisation in the running: the Legality Movement of Abas Kupi, who had broken his links with the LNC in September 1943. He chose the name Legaliteti to denote legitimacy and recall the 'Triumph of Legality' of 1924. This was the Zogist resistance, launched at the Congress of Herri on 23 November. Its manifesto promised not only democratic monarchy but also land reform, social insurance, and the retention of 'Ethnic Albania' (with Kosovo and Chameria).

This sounded like a big breakthrough for the King - and, relatively speaking, it was - but its significance needs to be qualified. On paper, Legality was a unified political movement. In truth, it was a fragile alliance of clans. Abas Kupi himself, a 'stocky, granite-faced illiterate Gheg', was a minor chieftain from Kruja, who had been no friend to Zogu in 1924 but latterly became a gendarmerie major as a means of keeping control of his district.3 His reputation as a patriot stemmed from his command of the Durres gendarmes in their battle against the Italians in 1939. Mati naturally supported Legality, as did various chiefs-cum-gendarmerie veterans, such as Xhemal Herri, Fiqri Dine, and Muharrem Bajraktari (who had conspired against Zog in the early 1930s). Even the Kryeziu brothers were involved on the margins. They all realised that Albania under an LNC regime (or even a BK one) would be dominated by Tosks. They associated communism with Russia, and Russia with Yugoslavia. And what role would there be for chieftains under Marxism-Leninism? The monarchy looked quite attractive by comparison. Zogism provided a unifying slogan for disparate local warlords.

Officially, at any rate, the political programme of Legality did not interest the BLOs, who were more troubled by its slowness to engage the Germans in a major way. Were the Zogists as passive as the Ballists? Gheg chieftains habitually hedged their bets and accepted guns from any source. More pointedly, the German command geared the political side of its occupation to winning over those who had not before collaborated. The Nazis claimed to have freed Albania from Italian rule. They classified its people as 'Aryans of Illyrian heritage' and promised to defend them from communism and partition, so long as they shunned the Allies and let Germany exploit the chrome mines. Despite the presence of German troops, Greater Albania was supposed to be independent and neutral from October 1943. To maintain this fiction, the Germans organised a constituent assembly to reinstate the 1928 constitution, which technically meant the restoration of the monarchy. Had King Zog not attached himself to the Allies, the Nazis might have placed him back on the throne. As it was, they made do with a regency, headed by the ex-premier Mehdi Frasheri (who had been interned by the Italians). Kostaq Kotta also accepted office in the new collaborationist regime. They imagined that they could install themselves in Tirana under German protection, declare Albanian neutrality, and then win Allied recognition as the war drew to a close. The Government had no authority beyond the towns and coastal plain, but there were secret contacts between the old Zogists with Frasheri in the capital and the old Zogists with Kupi in the mountains. To liaise with the Gheg chiefs, the German military even employed Zog's former adviser Myrdacz (till he was captured and shot by Partisans). There was not a simple dividing line between the lukewarm adherents of Legality and the lukewarm adherents of the puppet Government. Certain Gheg clans wanted to balance between the Germans and British until the final possible moment. Why declare for the Allies too soon and risk a backlash? This thinking paralysed relations between Legality and SOE. The clansmen would not attack the Germans until the British supplied arms. The British refused to supply arms till the clan^ attacked the Germans. A step-by-step approach might have been the answer, but the longer SOE tolerated the equivocations of Zogists and Ballists, the closer it came to a breach with the Partisans.

The British had hoped to broker a degree of unity. Could not the LNC, mainly in the south, co-operate to a minimal extent with the Zogists in the north? Definitely not, said Hoxha, when asked by senior BLO Brigadier Davies:
Zog was a murderer, a hangman, a thief, an adventurer and traitor. . . . This cruel feudal lord, agent of Austria-Hungary, agent of the Serbs and Wrangel's white Russians, agent of Mussolini, and executioner of the Albanian people, pretends to be King of the Albanians. ... In our country the very stones of the road see Zog as an enemy, let alone the Albanians who will tear him to bits if they catch him. I find it regrettable, General, that you even mentioned the name of this bandit.4

In December 1943, shortly before he was captured, Davies advised the British Government to give exclusive backing to the Partisans (as in Yugoslavia), for the reason that the LNC was most inclined to fight the Germans. It appears that the threat of reprisals (at the rate of a hundred lives to one) deterred Hoxha less than it did the patriarchs. Paradoxically, moreover, the communists may have been more willing to play the SOE game - guns in return for dead Nazis - because they anticipated British hostility later on. The anti-communist resistance hoped for an Anglo-American landing in the Balkans in 1944; the communist-led resistance feared one, so Hoxha wanted to make his bid for power before it could occur.

The bulk of British aid was destined for the Partisans, yet SOE hesitated to sever links with the Ballists and Zogists. Some experienced BLOs, notably Julian Amery and Billy McLean, still wanted to send arms to Legality. Militarily, they argued that it would be folly to drive the anti-communists into the enemy camp. Personally, moreover, Amery and McLean hated the idea of helping to install Stalinism. In effect, a right-wing faction within SOE wanted to work with Kupi and Zog to save Albania from communism, while left-wingers favoured the Partisans, and other BLOs tried to see things from a purely military perspective. The result was confusion and ultimately bitterness, but Zogism at last had its advocates (however junior) in British official circles.

The King himself had carried on urging the Allies to set up a Balkan bridgehead from Italy. 'The alternative,' he told Amery, 'was to hand over the whole peninsula to the Soviets.'5 Zog made light of the differences between the LNC, BK, and Legality. What was needed, he said, was a large-scale organisation to rise when the Allies landed. The Partisans were too closely connected with Yugoslavia to appeal to most Albanians. On the other hand, Abas Kupi was 'only one of several hundred small chiefs who could be mobilised' by a government-in-exile led by himself.6
McLean aimed to put Zog's influence to the test. In February 1944, he persuaded his superiors to let him try to bring Legality and the LNC together by getting Zog and Tito to write to Kupi and Hoxha respectively, each urging co-operation against the Germans. 'I didn't imagine that we would turn to Zog again,' minuted Eden, who feared that his involvement might enrage the Partisans.7 The King was not to know that the young SOE man who presented himself at Parmoor had such weak political backing. Instead of supplying a straightforward message at once, he chose to haggle. His draft letter to Kupi referred, for example, to the futility of exposing Albanian villages to burning and destruction. This sounded like an endorsement of the passivity that the British condemned. He also wanted to tell supporters that 'The Fatherland is faced by a great danger: Korga and especially Kosovo and Gjirokastra are coveted by our neighbours who spare no effort to pluck them from us.'8 Nationalist aspirations were strong in Legality, but Eden refused to let British officers convey a letter so offensive to Greek and Yugoslav opinion. Nor was a second draft satisfactory. McLean was on his way back to Albania by then, and no one else could be bothered to pursue the idea.

The BLOs on the ground tried again to persuade Legality to engage the Germans forthwith. Kupi replied that it would only do so when Britain recognised Zog as head of a government-in-exile. George Seymour, who received this ultimatum, dismissed it as a stalling device. Amery and McLean then undertook a mission to the Zogist heartland. His portrait adorned almost every home in Mati, though one old man frankly admitted, 'I am a monarchist in case the King should come back.'9 Led by the Olomani family, Mati had risen against the Italians in 1943, and Burreli had been torched in retaliation. Once bitten, twice shy. The Gheg elders were in no hurry to fight. Duped by Allied disinformation, they believed that Anglo-American forces were going to intervene anyway.
Perhaps Kupi sensed that this sounded too complacent. The LNC was getting more British weapons all the time. In May 1944, he made a final offer: 'Let the King send me a message through your mission, and if he tells me to fight with my bare hands, I will.'10 Amery and McLean at once contacted SOE headquarters in Bari, urging Eden to obtain the order from Zog right away. Their faith in Kupi stood in sharp contrast to reports from some BLOs, who almost despaired of the Ghegs. Others in SOE insisted on the primacy of the Partisans, whose numbers and morale were growing as they launched a full-scale offensive against the Germans. If it came out that the BLOs were acting as couriers for Legality, relations with Hoxha might suffer irreparable damage.

Eden felt that he could well do without all this. Albania, an insignificant backwater, threatened to become as vexatious as Greece or Yugoslavia. Churchill's support for the Greek monarchy was causing quite enough problems, and it could only suffer from association with Albanian royalists. Eden therefore did nothing about getting a letter to Kupi from Zog. Amery and McLean were simply urged to 'keep the pot boiling'.11 In their view (later Zogist orthodoxy), this decision threw away the last chance of restoring the monarchy and consigned the country to communism. Others dispute that a telegram from the King would have made anything like the impact that Kupi claimed. Who can say with certainty? There is romance in the idea of faithful clansmen awaiting the royal word - a word that never came, because of Foreign Office fainthearts and closet Reds in SOE. Recriminations have never ceased.

In May 1944, Zog was still planning to send Colonel Selmani to Albania to 'turn' the gendarmerie in synchronisation with the Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans. After D-Day, he faced up to the probability, actually a fact, that this was never going to happen. His optimistic public utterances changed little in the final year of the war: Allied victory would bring liberty to his nation, Albania should join a Balkan Confederation, and so forth. Privately, he did not delude himself. 'You will see that for us there will be no joyful armistice,' he told Geraldine.12

By his own admission, King Zog received little news from his homeland during the fateful summer of 1944. What he did hear must have sounded as bad as he could ever have anticipated. Armed with British rifles, Hoxha's Partisans swept through Albania, battling all who opposed them: Germans, Ballists, and Zogists. Outnumbered and outgunned, anti-communist leaders increasingly sought the aid of the Germans. Fiqri Dine of Dibra, a founder of Legality, ended up as premier of the puppet Government. In June, the LNC overran Mati, laying waste homes and livestock and subjecting captives to the ultimate humiliation of arrest by women soldiers. Counter-attacks by Legality failed. Civil war turned to rout, and the old ruling families fled for their lives after the German withdrawal. Hoxha took Tirana on 28 November 1944 and formed a Provisional Government. Zog was barred from the country.
'Another King gone down the drain!' grumbled Churchill,13 but, with communism sweeping all across eastern Europe, Albania in itself seemed hardly to matter. He had failed to mention it to Stalin when negotiating spheres of influence. The Americans cared even less.

The year 1945 was a bleak and empty one for King Zog, who appreciated the irony of congratulatory telegrams on VE Day from less astute supporters. Mussolini had gone before a firing squad ten days earlier, as had Ciano a year before, but this gave him no satisfaction. Italy had ceased to be a factor in Albanian politics in 1943. Tito and Stalin now exerted the leverage. While Geraldine and Leka spent the summer at Frinton, Zog went through the motions of protesting his rights. 'The King did not seem to despair of his eventual return to Albania.'14
The communist takeover had made more of the emigres regard him as the lesser evil, but Fan Noli enraged the Zogists for the final time by pressing the United States Government to recognise the Hoxha regime, in the belief that recognition of an Albanian Government (regardless of ideology) would help preserve national integrity. Greece still coveted the south of Albania, and Tito wanted it to become a constituent republic of Yugoslavia.

When King Zog wrote to Allied Foreign Ministers in September 1945, only the Chinese even acknowledged his note. It was clearly time to close his overseas missions. The Big Three alone counted in international affairs, and two of them had all but surrendered the Balkans (save Greece) to the third, the USSR. The new Labour Government in London, he thought, was unlikely to be sympathetic. Of course, if only the Allies 'had taken advantage of his offers of service at an earlier stage', he might have saved the region. The more Zog learnt about British dealings with Hoxha and Kupi, the more indignant he grew. In November 1945, Britain recognised the Albanian Government. Had he not explained that there were no more than a hundred real communists in the country? Had he not alerted the Foreign Office to the fact that Hoxha was 'pursuing a drastic policy of trials and executions'?15 The Reds accused their enemies of war crimes and collaboration. Meanwhile, land reform won over peasants (unaware that collectivisation would follow). A communist-run Democratic Front polled 93 per cent in single-party elections, and the People's Republic formally replaced the monarchy on 11 January 1946.

In his immediate response, Zog tried to sound statesmanlike:
The King cannot consider these elections as free. It would have been our desire, after this long and tragic period, that the people of the country should be free to re-establish the situation as they wanted, but for us Albanians there is a more important question than that of the regime, and that is the question of national and territorial integrity.16

Even so, for the rest of his life, he would deny that anyone else could be the legitimate Head of State of Albania. This contention did not depend on a rigid idea of monarchical rights, he avowed, but sprang from a genuine belief in popular sovereignty. 'I have always been Albania's first republican,' he informed a puzzled journalist (adding, 'When I was made King, I was the only one to protest').1? His basic point was that the will of the people had not been properly ascertained: the elections were rigged, so the abolition of the monarchy was invalid. His status as King rested on legality - the word now a Zogist talisman - since he had never abdicated. This argument overlooked the fact that Prince Wilhelm of Albania (who died in 1945) had never abdicated either, and it was Zogu himself who had declared the first Albanian republic in 1925 with an equally dubious mandate. So much for constitutional casuistry. At the close of the war, as at its start, no foreign power had any use for Zog as a pretender.

'He will always be something of an embarrassment so long as he remains here,' noted a British official.^ In fact, he did not require much pushing. His tenancy of Parmoor was about to expire, and, though he considered buying a house in Grosvenor Square, he objected to paying rates. The Albanians left Buckinghamshire by coach on 11 February 1946 and sailed from Liverpool next day. The press failed to print a 'message of appreciation and thanks to the British people' but reported parliamentary questions on the uneconomic use of shipping and secret supplies of clothing coupons. Salih Doshishti was stung to protest:

The facts are that King Zog's party consisted of 19 people having between them only 136 pieces of luggage, and that these 136 pieces -and not 2,000 as reported in The Times of February 13 - include such items as a gramophone, two portable cases of gramophone records, two typewriters, a radio set, a few cases of books, some files, and a child's bicycle. These 136 pieces represent all their possessions accumulated through nearly six years of exile in this country, and which they had to take with them as they were leaving England for good. . . . The report of King Zog's 30 new suits is equally untrue . . . when he left this country the King possessed only five suits altogether.19

This final petty outburst of bad publicity can only have served to convince the King that he was making the right decision.


Bibliography

42. Twelve Hundred Miles Away
1. News Chronicle, 26 July 1943
2. Kemp p. 95
3. Ibid. p. 78
4. Hoxha pp. 99-100
5. Amery (1973) p. 312
6. Herbert to Cadogan, 20 Feb. 1944, FO 371/43562
7. Minute by Eden, 6 Feb. 1944, FO 371/43549
8. Hibbert pp. 134-5
9. Amery (1973) p. 339
10. Ibid. p. 345
11. Fielding p. 46
12. Robyns p. 136
13. Gilbert pp. 1000-1
14. Memo by Ryan, 4 Aug. 1945, FO 371/48100
15. Ibid.
16. New York Times, 12 Jan. 1946
17. Daily Sketch, 11 Dec. 1945
18. Minute by Lasky, 9 Oct. 1945, FO 371/48100
19. The Times, 19 Feb. 1946


Nxjerre nga libri me titull "King Zog of Albania, Europe's self-made muslim monarch" i Jason Tomes, faqet 260-267, publikuar me shkurt 2004. Librin mund ta blini ne amazon.com dhe eshte biografia me e mire mbi mbretin Zog nga nje i huaj.